1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a CAD system and, more particularly, to a process for teamwork designing to enable a plurality of designers to design an object by designing in parallel the respective parts of the object to which they have been assigned.
2. Description of the Related Art
In designing a large object composed of a multiplicity of parts, for example, an automobile, a teamwork designing system is adopted. In the teamwork designing system, a life-size design drawing is prepared and it is divided into a plurality of portions to which a plurality of designers are assigned. Each designer designs the portion to which he has been assigned while referring to adjacent parts and taking the relationship and the gap between the part under his control and adjacent parts, etc. into consideration. If the design of another part is modified, the designer for the part which has relation thereto always confirms the modified part. In such a designing system, the designers are therefore in comparatively close communication with each other.
In contrast with such a traditional technique, with the recent rapid generalization of a what is called CAD (Computer Aided Design), a teamwork CAD system has been introduced. In this system, the structure of the object is represented by a tree structure, and a plurality of designers simultaneously design the parts under their own control using their respective terminal processing units, thereby improving the efficiency of designing and shortening the time required for designing. In this teamwork CAD system, it is necessary to prevent a plurality of designers from modifying one part at the same time. For the purpose of smooth progress of designing which prevents such an overlapping modification, the modification information which indicate by whom and when a part was modified is controlled as described in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. Hei 2-48774.
In addition, since it is necessary for each designer to take the interference between the part in his charge and another part into consideration, the CAD system enables the display unit of each terminal processing unit to display the necessary part every time the designer demands it for reference.
In the conventional CAD system, however, a designer cannot know the latest shape of another part which is being designed by another designer in real time. In other words, while a designer a is referring to a part X which is under the control of another designer b, if the part X is modified by the designer b, the information on the modified shape is not transmitted to the designer a.
That is, the communication between the designers is somewhat deteriorated in comparison with the communication in the teamwork designing system before the CAD system was introduced. As a result, in spite of a reduction in the time required for designing by each designer, it is impossible to enhance the efficiency of designing as a whole and to improve the quality of the design.